In fact, then, in terms of literature, by the middle of 1960 García Márquez was at a loose end. He was even thinking of going back to Barranquilla to work on cinema with Alvaro Cepeda, if the job with the Cuban Revolution did not work out.57 On one of his visits to Barranquilla the Medellín cinema delegate Alberto Aguirre and García Márquez sat waiting in the Hotel del Prado for Cepeda, who was supposed to be coming with a proposal for a national cinematographic organization but failed to arrive. Over lunch García Márquez mentioned in passing that Mercedes had phoned from Bogotá to tell him they needed to pay 600 pesos to prevent their services from being disconnected. Aguirre was a lawyer and editor, who had admired No One Writes to the Colonel when it was published by Mito two years before. At the end of the meal he offered to re-publish the novel. García Márquez said: “You’re mad, you know my books don’t sell in Colombia. Remember what happened with the first edition of Leaf Storm.” Aguirre set out to persuade him, however, and offered him 800 pesos, 200 in advance. García Márquez thought about the electricity bill and agreed on the spot. In a letter a year later, he would complain that he was “the only person who makes verbal contracts when he’s hung over, sprawling in a bamboo rocking chair, in the afternoon heat of the tropics.”58 What he said to Aguirre was right, though. When the book came out in 1961 only 800 of the first 2,000 copies would be sold. If he had waited for success in Colombia he might have waited for ever.
13
The Cuban Revolution
and the USA
1959–1961
IN SEPTEMBER 1960 the Argentinian Jorge Ricardo Masetti, the founder of Prensa Latina, arrived in Bogotá on his way to Brazil. Masetti, who had film star looks and a dashing manner to rival his friend and compatriot Ernesto Che Guevara, was already involved in a desperate struggle against Communist Party sectarianism, a subject he had discussed frequently in Havana with Plinio Mendoza. During his brief two-day visit to Bogotá Masetti visited García Márquez at his home and told both him and Mendoza that he could no longer afford to have two trustworthy people in Colombia. Which of them, he asked, was willing to leave for another posting? Despite being unmarried, Mendoza, who had already been to Cuba seven times that year as well as to San Francisco for a meeting of the Inter-American Press Association (SIP), said he wanted to stay in Colombia, so García Márquez, who had hit it off with Masetti from the very beginning, agreed to go.1 The idea was for him to spend a few months on and off in Havana to orientate himself about Prensa Latina’s latest methods, to help in training new journalists, and then be sent on some specific assignment. He set off almost at once, via Barranquilla, where he left Mercedes and Rodrigo for another holiday with her family.
He travelled to Havana at least four times in the next three months, staying for an entire month on one occasion. Havana was a city under siege, struggling to make its revolutionary progress amidst constant fears of counter-revolution and the daily possibility of the seemingly inevitable U.S. invasion. Castro had nationalized numerous enterprises earlier in the year and in August he had finally expropriated all U.S. property on the island in revenge for U.S. “economic aggression.” A month earlier Khrushchev had backed Cuba’s historic claim to the U.S. enclave of Guantánamo as relations began to harden. On 3 September the Soviet leader demanded that the United Nations be removed from New York to a more neutral location; by the 29th he would be thumping the desk with his shoe in the same United Nations and ostentatiously embracing Fidel Castro. This, undoubtedly was war, or at least the prelude to it.
The Prensa Latina office was just two blocks from the Malecón, the avenue that winds along Havana’s Caribbean seafront. The roads outside were barricaded with sandbags and roadblocks and there were revolutionary soldiers on guard at all times. When he was in Havana García Márquez shared a small apartment on the twentieth floor of the Retiro Médico Building with a Brazilian journalist, Aroldo Wall. They had two bedrooms, a lounge and a terrace overlooking the sea. They would eat in the Cibeles restaurant at the base of the building or in other restaurants close by. For the three months he spent on and off in Havana these were almost the only places García Márquez saw.2 Yet again he found himself in at the early stages of a project which required that everyone, including him, should strive to the very limits of their capacity. There was no timetable of any kind; everyone worked whenever it was necessary and there was some new crisis every day. Sometimes he would slip off to the cinema in the evening and when he got back to the office late at night Masetti would still be there; often García Márquez would then work with him until five in the morning; and then Masetti would be calling him again at nine.
Before long the office was heavily infiltrated by orthodox Communists, led by the influential and experienced Aníbal Escalante, who were apparently plotting to take over the revolution from within; on one occasion Masetti and García Márquez actually caught them organizing a secret meeting late at night.3 The hard-liners (known as mamertos in Colombia), “dogmatic” and “sectarian,” who had a long history in Cuba of collaborating, sometimes “opportunistically,” with “reformist” “bourgeois” parties and governments, were suspicious of anyone who was not a Party member. They kept information to themselves, attempted to channel the new revolution’s policies within Moscow-style perspectives using Moscow-style rhetoric and doctrines, and sabotaged initiatives led by others even when they suited the purposes of the new government. Watching this as closely as he now did, García Márquez would learn bitter lessons which would mark all his political attitudes and activities in the future. Already he was asking himself the same question that was being asked by almost everyone on the island and that they would still be asking almost half a century later: what was Fidel thinking?
His closest relationships were with Masetti and another Argentinian writer and journalist, Rodolfo Walsh, who was there with his wife, Poupée Blanchard, and in charge of the so-called Special Services. In 1957 Walsh had written one of Latin America’s classic documentary narratives, Operation Massacre (Operación Masacre), about a military conspiracy in Argentina, in a style not dissimilar to García Márquez’s Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. The high point of García Márquez’s time in Cuba came when Walsh deciphered the CIA’s coded messages about the preparations for what would be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion (or as Playa Girón to the Cubans). Masetti followed the work of each national agency every day and had noticed garbled paragraphs from Tropical Cable on the teleprinter. Tropical Cable was the Guatemalan affiliate of All American Cable and Masetti began to smell a rat. Walsh, aided by a manual of cryptology, managed to decipher the entire document after several days and nights without sleep. It was a coded message from Guatemala to Washington about the plans for invading Cuba in April 1961. When the code was cracked García Márquez was called in to join in the celebrations. Masetti wanted Walsh to visit the counter-revolutionary training grounds at Retalhuleu in Guatemala disguised as a Protestant Bible-selling pastor, but the Cuban authorities had other, less romantic intelligence strategies in mind and Walsh was kept in Havana.4
Between visits to Cuba García Márquez would return to Bogotá and his family. His last trip to the island was in December 1960 on a Pan-American flight from Barranquilla via Camagüey. In Camagüey he was waiting for his connection to Havana but the weather was bad and the flight was delayed. Suddenly, as he stood around waiting for news, there was a commotion in the airport lounge: Fidel Castro had arrived with his companion Celia Sánchez. The Comandante was hungry and asked for a chicken dish at the airport cafeteria. When told there was no chicken Castro said he had been out touring chicken farms for three days and why couldn’t the revolution deliver chicken to the airport, especially as the gringos were always saying that the Cubans were starving to death and here was the airport proving their point. No one intervened when García Márquez approached Celia Sánchez and explained who he was and what he was doing in Cuba. Castro came back, greeted García Márquez and then remonstrated with him too about the problems in Cuba rel
ating to chickens and eggs. Castro and Sánchez were waiting for a DC-3 to take them back to Havana; in the meantime chicken was finally found and Castro disappeared to the restaurant. Then he reappeared and was told the airport in Havana was closed due to the continuing bad weather. Castro retorted, “I have to be there at five. We go.” García Márquez, hoping as usual that his own flight would be long delayed, was unsure whether the Cuban leader was insane or simply reckless. When he arrived in Havana hours later in a Cubana Viscount he was relieved to see Castro’s plane parked on the runway. He has been worrying about the Cuban leader’s welfare ever since.
Just before Christmas Masetti dropped by one day and said, “We’re going to Lima, the office there has problems.” They stopped off for a day in Mexico City and García Márquez was dazzled by his first sight of the majestic Aztec capital, little imagining that he would spend much of his future life there. Alvaro Mutis had recently been released from Lecumberri Prison after fourteen months serving a sentence for embezzlement in Colombia, where he had been excessively generous to friends with the budget his employers at Esso had given him for his work in public relations. García Márquez paid him a visit and was given the usual warm welcome, with Mutis proving just as hospitable when he had to stump up himself.
Then García Márquez and Masetti flew on towards Lima via Guatemala City in a 707 jet, the first time García Márquez had had this near supersonic experience. Given Masetti and Walsh’s discovery of Guatemala’s involvement in the preparations of the Cuban exiles, Masetti was excited at stopping off, albeit briefly, in the Mayan country’s capital city. In the airport, on an impulse, Masetti argued for travelling to the insurgents’ training camp which Walsh had identified at Retalhuleu and causing some mischief. García Márquez said it would be foolhardy and Masetti sneered, “You’re just a timid little liberal, aren’t you!” So instead of that adventure they played a prank on the local dictator Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. The information about the rebel training camp had not been published internationally but Masetti, somewhat irresponsibly, decided to give Ydígoras a fright. In the airport was a large photograph of a Guatemalan national park in front of a volcano. The two men had their photograph taken in front of the picture and then enclosed the photograph in an envelope with a message which said, “We’ve travelled your entire country and we’ve discovered what you are doing to assist in the invasion of Cuba.” They gave details of locations and numbers of troops. After they had mailed the letter the airport was closed due to bad weather. García Márquez said to Masetti, “Do you realize we’re going to have to sleep in this airport tonight and tomorrow that bastard Ydígoras is going to receive our letter and cut our balls off!” Fortunately the airport reopened in time and they flew on out.5
García Márquez never made it to Lima on that trip. When they stopped over in Panama Masetti heard him trying to call Mercedes. He asked where she was and when García Márquez said “Barranquilla” Masetti told him to go on home to his wife and baby because it was immediately before Christmas. So García Márquez changed his ticket and flew to Barranquilla, though not before being briefly detained by the Panamanian police.
Even in the few months García Márquez had been in Havana, relations had worsened in Prensa Latina between Masetti’s people and the Communist Party sectarians who wanted to bring the revolution in line with the Soviet Union’s Euro-centred conception of world revolution. He and Mendoza watched in anguish as the time-servers and bureaucrats, reciters of Moscow mantras, began to harass, supplant and eventually persecute the romantic, open-hearted, long-haired revolutionary vagabonds with whom Masetti and García Márquez identified. These men and women, and the Cuban people for whom they had fought, had established a style, prompted by Castro and Guevara, in which everything was improvised, spontaneous and informal: hence, just for a start, the two supreme leaders were called “Fidel” and “Che,” and there was also “Raúl,” and “Camilo.” But Masetti had already told García Márquez and Mendoza that a Communist Party spy was watching their every move in Colombia following the visit of a Cuban agent to the Bogotá office. Masetti reproached Mendoza for sending him letters of complaint which could be read by his enemies and forwarded to his superiors: one of them had ended up in the hands of Che Guevara himself.6 In each fibre of the new Cuba, in each office, in each factory, the struggle was under way for the heart and soul of the revolution. Plinio Mendoza believes that the old-style communists won the first round—hence Masetti’s difficulties (and, eventually, those of Guevara)—but that Castro would win the second when he put Escalante on trial and began to give the communists a taste of their own medicine.7 The struggle, far too complex for facile interpretation, has continued ever since.
Back in Havana again in the new year, Masetti, under increasing pressure, decided to send García Márquez to Montreal, to open the new office there. That quickly fell through but there was an opening in New York. Even better! García Márquez went back to Bogotá to tidy up his affairs at the Colombian office; he cancelled his apartment rental, left his dining-room suite and other furniture to Mendoza, and kept his plans quiet, staying clandestinely with his old friend from Cartagena, Franco Múnera, who by then was also living in Bogotá.8 Then he flew down to Barranquilla to pick up Mercedes and Rodrigo, who had stayed on there with her family. He left all his books with his sister Rita in Cartagena in a huge wooden box. Eligio, the family book-worm, would speculate about “Gabito’s box” for many years.9
The young family travelled to New York in early January 1961. The United States had broken off relations with Cuba on 3 January, so this was not an ideal time to be embarking on such an adventure but it shows once again García Márquez’s extraordinary knack of arriving in the right place at around the time that everything is just beginning to happen there. On 20 January John F. Kennedy was installed as the youngest ever President of the United States. Though compromised by the policy of the outgoing administration towards Cuba, he would probably have supported an invasion of Cuba in any case. The New York Prensa Latina office, in a skyscraper near the Rockefeller Center, was short-staffed so they were happy to have García Márquez aboard.10 It was a moment of maximum paranoia and the new arrival was not impressed by his prospects. “I had never known a better place to be murdered in,” he would write later. “It was a sordid, solitary office in an old building by the Rockefeller Center, with a room full of teleprinters and an editorial office with just one window which looked out on a courtyard way down below, always gloomy and smelling of frozen soot, from which rose day and night the sound of rats fighting for scraps in the garbage bins.”11 Years later he would tell American novelist William Kennedy that New York at that time was “like no place else. It was putrefying, but also was in the process of rebirth, like the jungle. It fascinated me.”12
By now there were a hundred thousand Cuban refugees in Miami and thousands more were arriving every month. Many of them came on to New York. The United States was planning on using many of these refugees in its invasion and was sending them to the clandestine camps in Guatemala for training. Although the coming invasion of Cuba was a state secret, almost everyone in Miami knew about it. As García Márquez would later say, “there never was a war more fore-told.”13 In New York pro- and anti-revolutionary Latin Americans would take care to go to different bars, restaurants and cinemas. It was dangerous to stray into enemy territory and full-pitched battles were frequent; the police were usually careful not to arrive until it was all over. García Márquez was equally careful to avoid the confrontations.
The family spent only five months in New York but García Márquez would later remember it as one of the most stressful periods of his life. They lived in the Webster Hotel near Fifth Avenue, in the very heart of Manhattan. The Prensa Latina workers were under constant pressure from Cuban refugees and anti-Castro hysteria. Telephone abuse from counter-revolutionary gusanos (“worms,” the term the revolution used) was a daily occurrence, to which García Márquez and his colleagues would routine
ly reply: “Tell that to your mother, you bastard.” They made sure that they had improvised home-made weapons with them at all times. One day Mercedes had a call threatening her and Rodrigo, with the caller saying that he knew where they lived and at what time of the day she took the child for a walk—usually to nearby Central Park. Mercedes had a friend in Jamaica, at the other end of the city; she said nothing about the call to her husband but went to stay with the friend for a while, saying she was bored being stuck in the hotel all day. It was probably appropriate that García Márquez was again revising In Evil Hour, his most sinister book, at the time.
After Mercedes left the hotel he spent most of his time in the office, sleeping there at night on a couch under conditions of increasing tension. On 13 March he attended a historic press conference in Washington at which John F. Kennedy announced that he was setting up the Alliance for Progress.14 This presaged a brief period in which the United States began to talk the language of human rights, democracy and cooperation after many decades supporting Latin American dictators, a policy to which the USA would soon, however, return—in 1964, in Brazil—and would ratchet up with a vengeance in the 1970s. García Márquez acknowledged that Kennedy’s speech was “worthy of an Old Testament prophet” but dubbed the Alliance “an emergency patch to keep out the new winds of the Cuban Revolution.”15
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 34